Digital lighting technologies, i.e., illumination based on semiconductor light sources, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), offer a viable alternative to traditional fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lamps. Functional advantages and benefits of LEDs include high energy conversion and optical efficiency, durability, lower operating costs, and many others. Recent advances in LED technology have provided efficient and robust full-spectrum lighting sources that enable a variety of lighting effects in many applications. Some of the fixtures embodying these sources feature a lighting module, including one or more LEDs capable of producing different colors, e.g., red, green, and blue, as well as a processor for independently controlling the output of the LEDs in order to generate a variety of colors and color-changing lighting effects, for example, as discussed in detail in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,016,038 and 6,211,626, incorporated herein by reference.
Existing luminaires commonly used in existing buildings often must conform with commonplace architectural constraints. For example, ceilings in commercial and government buildings may have standard-sized panels for receiving architectural components such as panel luminaires and tiles. Panel luminaires built for installation into these types of environments—and the light sources employed in those panel luminaires—may therefore have standard sizes and may be manufactured in bulk, making alterations to these panels difficult.
In many panel luminaire configurations, at least some light from one or more light sources is extracted (e.g., by a light guide panel) but misdirected somewhere other than to the environment to be lighted (e.g., over an edge of the panel housing and/or over a T-bar of the ceiling). This may lead to optical losses and/or lower luminaire efficacy. Additionally, in many panel luminaire configurations, light remains unextracted and is instead wasted inside of the luminaire's housing. Further, in many panel luminaires, the components (e.g., reflective layer, light guide panel, dispersion aesthetic panel) are “sandwiched” tightly together, leaving little to no room for architectural features. Thus, there is a need in the art to create new panel luminaires, or to modify existing panel luminaires, to extract light more efficiently and to be able to receive three-dimensional architectural details.